Hundreds of thousands in lottery jackpots go unclaimed

We reported earlier on the announcement of two winning Mega Millions lottery tickets in last night's drawing for the $370 million jackpot.

No winning tickets were sold in New York. One winning ticket was traced to a Campark Liquors in Woodbine, N.J., and another to a market in Dalton, Ga., lottery representatives in the two states said. California is still checking its Mega Millions results. For more, see NewsFlash and the report posted earlier this morning in the Breaking News blog.

Sometimes those winning tickets aren't returned and the jackpots go unclaimed. Apparently the largest unclaimed jackpot was $51.7 million in Indiana in 2002, according to The New York Times.

In some games, winners have up to a year to claim their prize. State lotteries across the country every year have hundreds of thousands of dollars in winnings that go unclaimed. For example, a $200,000 winning Powerball ticket sold in Iowa a year ago expires Sunday. A $200,000 winning ticket expires March 22 in Arizona. And in Michigan, three winning tickets worth about $250,000 each will expire this year if nobody redeems them.